


“A Little Moonshine Ain’t No Sin”

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell, 地縛少年花子くん | Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun | Toilet-bound Hanako-kun (Manga)
Genre: (because the premise is Hadestown Persephone's speakeasy for the dead), Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Ancient Greek Religion & Lore Fusion, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hadestown Crossover, Hurt/Comfort, Songfic, everyone in this AU is old enough to both drink and/or be married to a deity, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23396701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: “You want the moon?  Yeah, I got her too — she’s right here waiting, in my pay-per-view.” — “Our Lady of the Underground,” Hadestown.The Goddess of Springtime in the world of the dead offers Amane Yugi a gift.Hadestown AU, casting Nene Yashiro as Persephone.  The story title is also from “Our Lady of the Underground.”
Relationships: (I wonder if that tag's ever been used before ahahaha), Hades/Persephone (Hadestown), Hanako | Yugi Amane & Yashiro Nene, Hanako | Yugi Amane/Yashiro Nene, Yashiro Nene & Hades
Comments: 15
Kudos: 81





	“A Little Moonshine Ain’t No Sin”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!!! I hope you enjoy this fic, if you read it~ This happened because I was re-listening through Hadestown, as I do, and I was like "Hanako could be OFFERED the moon in Persephone's speakeasy, but I doubt he'd take it....." And then. Fic.
> 
> I’m mostly referring to my favorite iteration of the Hadestown cast recording, here, btw.... the live one from 2017. :) I think you can read this fic without listening, but the songs are really fun in my opinion and hearing them could add a lot of context! The song I refer to the most is “Our Lady of the Underground,” cause the idea of Persephone’s speakeasy for the dead is just.... I love it. :’) There were definitely creative liberties taken here, though. This fic does not follow the musical exactly, by any means. I typed up a huge rant about what songs I took particular inspiration from for this fic, but decided not to include it in these notes... it was just So Much. So let’s say.... I took a lot of inspiration from the album, but not everything is the same, and I'd be happy to clarify further if you're curious. @_@
> 
> Thank you!!!! I hope you’re staying safe and having a wonderful day.
> 
> https://sunlightinourheadlights.tumblr.com/post/642035124401242112/fanart-based-on-a-little-moonshine-aint-no-sin <\-- AHHHH whoa sincerelyand/sunlightinourheadlights/Karen drew some amazing art for this story (thank you so so much, again)!!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 I truly recommend going to check out her work. :')

***

“Way Down, Hadestown, Way Down Under the Ground”

***

It had been plenty of coal-dusted, squinting-in-the-glaring-neon years since Amane Yugi died. He wasn’t sure exactly how many, to be honest with you. He’d boarded the train to Hadestown with blood splattered down the front of his shirt and the wind toying its way through a gaping wound in his chest. He handed gore-smeary coins to the ticket-taker without counting out the right amount for fare or anything, and when the traveler god Hermes looked sadly — softly, tiredly — at him, Amane shrugged his shoulders as if to say, _“Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”_

Maybe he thought he was gonna get sent to Tartarus, then. That was where all the very worst souls went. But maybe Tartarus was getting a little crowded, lately, ‘cause the train dropped Amane off in Hadestown proper, just like all the rest. 

Of course Amane wanted to stay in the living world, to finish his work, to explore, to go just so many places. But none of that was for him, anymore. And anyway, the dead had all been shepherded to the train station. That was Hermes’s job, among other things, to get them down safe into the dirt. Amane supposed his brother Tsukasa must have ridden the train to Hadestown just a little bit before him — musta missed him on the way out, you know?

Thinking about it made Amane dig his fingernails deep into his palms, which was no good, not in the underworld. There was always work to do, in Hades’s glittering caves. The dead fed even their bones to the great machinery of it all, in the end. Bones to oil. There were the mines, and there was the great seething wall of the River Styx, and there was the throne room where the Keeper of the Dead watched his workers through huge dark windows and waited for autumn to come.

But Amane never saw the throne room, mind you, just like he never saw the moon at night anymore. He saw the pickax he used in the mines, and he saw the dirty callouses on his hands, and he saw those hands start to bleed when he thought too much about Tsukasa — (about what had happened with Tsukasa in the end, really) — and did the thing with his fingernails again. Amane had work gloves, but that didn’t help a whole ton with the blood. He had friends in the mines, too, sorta. There were people he talked to. People who laughed at his antics, when he let himself play a role for a little while. When he let himself forget. 

Amane was exhausted. Was this what being dead meant? Being exhausted? He didn’t sleep anymore. No one did, and Mr. Hades kept everything so impossibly bright. He shaped intricate flowers out of neon and gold, out of flickering lights and gemstones, and he hung them around the dour cave-world as if people might mistake jewelry for his wife’s own living vines. Lady Persephone was away until autumn. 

It felt like Lady Persephone was _always_ away, or else Amane’s almost-friends here in the underground were spending all their spare time at her secret bar. A speakeasy, kinda. A place called Springtime. 

People said there was a crack in the eons-deep cave ceiling, there, that worked its way up to the top of the world. To the clear living air. Persephone could siphon down a little of her powers, from way up there. She could bring a taste of life down for the dead; she kept the wind in a jar, and flowers sprouted from between the slabs of wood on her bar when she danced. 

But for just the same reasons as he’d never let himself drink from the River Lethe to forget Tsukasa completely... to forget the _person he was_ , and with himself, his shame... Amane had never visited Springtime. After all he’d done, was it really okay for him to cheat death like that? To taste rainwater on his skin again, or feel leaves crunching beneath his shoes, or... (and this was the true taboo, the thing Amane wanted almost more than he wanted to feel innocent and clean again)... walk for just a moment on the surface of the moon?

Persephone kept the moon behind a pay-per-view curtain. Everybody whispered about it. She could sprinkle a sky full of stars over your head just as easily as she could pour you a drink. She was the goddess of Springtime, after all, and that didn’t just mean the bar. Springtime was rebirth, was second chances, was raw _life_ , left unbound and free. 

Obviously Amane didn’t go to Springtime — how could he? — until one day, Springtime came to him. 

It happened when he found somebody crying, getting off the train into Hadestown. Amane was supposed to be reporting to work, but even so he stopped a second to wait for whoever it was to pass him by. It was strange to hear a lot of honest _emotion_ deep in the mines, to be real with you. Everyone had been worn down completely, after another summer in the deep. Everyone was keeping their heads low. 

But this woman had the sunlight itself peeking out through the seams of her suitcases, and her hair was long, pale green and blooming with lacy flowers. They were sprouting out of her very skull, and she was barefoot. She was spitting angry words through all her tears — “Hades, _that wasn’t six months_ — you ended summer early again! The humans are gonna starve!” — and Lord Hades his very own self was running a crypt-cold hand from her flowering hair down to the middle of her back, not even seeming to hear her. 

As Hades’s hand smoothed down Persephone’s hair, all the flowers shriveled up and died, replaced by carefully pinned flower hair ornaments, looking tight enough to pinch her and not letting any curls fall free. Her bare feet were bound into high button-up boots, and her skirts became too heavy to dance in, dusty and grey like flowers pressed for decades in a book nobody felt like reading. 

“There you are,” Hades crooned. Sweet and dripping, like cave water that would never see the sun. “You look _mine_ again.”

Persephone’s voice shook. “ _Your wife_ is still in hiding, Hades. I was a human, don’t forget. Just some stranger you found, saying her lines until I’m blue in the face.” A breath. “The two of you were happy, once. Go find her!”

“ _She_ didn’t want my love,” Hades chuckled. It was a bitter, humorless thing. “And so I gave my love to you. You wanted it.”

Persephone ran a hand over her skull, then, where the flowers had been. Her hand came away smeared with dust. “This isn’t love,” she said. “I was wrong.”

Hades kissed Persephone on the forehead, and then both cheeks, methodical, like it was a ritual meant to seal her there. His hair was long and oil-dark, pinned back in a low ponytail. His eyes held no light. When he left her, Persephone’s cheeks were wet with new tears and she was struggling to rip even _one_ of the flower hairpins off her head. They weren’t coming loose. 

It was an unspoken rule that none of the dead got to talk about the way Hades and Persephone fought... or even that this wasn’t the original goddess Persephone, who had fled maybe centuries before and been replaced with fragile mortal shells more times than anyone knew. But even still... _even knowing the rules_... Amane didn’t hurry back to his work. Instead, he propped his pickax up against the wall and called, trying to make his voice sound drawling and easy, like a friend’s might, “Lady Persephone — would you like help getting those things out of your hair?” 

Persephone did. It barely felt real. She and Amane sat on her luggage — she insisted, really, that he not just hang around on the ground, even if he _was_ already more coal dust than human — and fiddled with/ripped at/tried to deconstruct the metallic gemstone hairpins together. It was no use, but by the time they finished working at it Amane had heard the goddess Persephone laugh. She’d teased him, too, and he teased her right back before he remembered who he was, and what sort of primal nature-goddess forces he was dealing with. 

Persephone asked Amane his name, and he gave it to her, sure, even with all the sins attached. When the goddess told him he should come by Springtime later to see her again, he said yeah, yeah he would. Just as soon as he got a break. Amane could visit Springtime if it meant making the goddess laugh again, couldn’t he? If she wanted to see him again. 

Maybe someone like Persephone wouldn’t have been as kind to Amane if she could see the gaping, eternally-bleeding hole in his chest, through all his clothes... if she knew what Amane’d done with his family’s best kitchen knife before he died. But he didn’t think of that, when she was holding onto his arm as if she was gonna drag the both of them out of Hadestown together. When she was looking him in the eyes, and smiling like they were both alive again, somehow. When she was telling him she never did have very good luck with men, and she’d just been fooled by a pretty face and the promise of love a long time ago. 

Honestly, it was hard to think of anything at all, just then, except that Amane really did wanna know the Goddess Persephone’s human name. 

***

“C’mere, Brother — Lemme Guess. It’s the Little Things You Miss!”

***

On Amane Yugi’s very first trip to Springtime – the goddess Persephone’s secret bar tucked away deep in her husband’s mines – he wasn’t sure what to order. The menu had been curated for centuries by dozens of different Persephones, as the Lord of the Underworld traded out one mortal wife for another. The first menu items had been scribbled down by the original Persephone herself, it was said, before she disappeared. _Before she ran_. That first Persephone’s handwriting was wild and honest, writing in nectar, and pollen, and berry juices that still smelled sweet after all these years. The newest Persephone doodled some of the menu items next to their names, writing with a cute glittery pen she’d smuggled down from the living world. 

Amane knew if he was gonna order anything at all, it would have to be one of the newest Persephone’s recommended choices. He had allowed himself to come here for _her_ , after all, whether or not he deserved it. She had asked for him to come here, when he’d met her outside the train into Hadestown. 

When Amane murmured the password that Lady Persephone gave him against a dank cave wall, vines twisted their way up the stone and tangled into a cute door, with flowers shaping themselves into a little circular window right in the middle. Blue and white petals gathered there, pretending to be a sky full of clouds. The wooden doorknob turned easily in his hand, and Persephone herself hopped up over the bar to greet him. Her hair was falling loose down her back again – here, with the crack in the wall leading up to the living world above, Persephone could steal back enough of her power for that at least. Her fancy shoes were kicked off by the door. This was more like the Persephone living humans got to meet every _actual_ spring, and she pulled Amane over to a barstool by the front of his shirt.

Persephone brushed some coal dust out of Amane’s hair and asked what she could get him. Maybe a handful of sand from a beach he’d visited when he was alive, complete with the smell of the ocean, the feeling of sun on his skin? Maybe a rum-and-coke, or something to eat? Amane told her he’d need a second to decide, actually. Sorry. He gaped around at the other dead gathered there, in Springtime, sipping cocktails, swallowed up in memories of their time on earth. If Lord Hades knew about this place… if he really understood what it _meant_ … he would shut Springtime down for sure. Right? It couldn’t be okay for the dead to reach for things like this, for lives that weren’t supposed to be theirs anymore.

 _It wasn’t right for Amane to be there, either_. But he saw the way Persephone was grinning at him, and getting him that ancient, way-too-complicated menu of hers, and he stayed sitting on the bar stool she’d offered him. He smiled back at her. _It was so good_ to see Persephone with a spring in her step, bantering with her patrons, thick ankles hanging with braided bracelets and vines. It was so good to see what she looked like when she wasn’t crying, or trying to remind Hades that just because he wanted her down below didn’t mean he had any right to leave the humans up above with dying crops, with frozen windowpanes and winter come much, much too early. There had to be a balance to things like this. There had to be mercy. Or wasn’t _that_ why the first Lady Persephone had given up on him, when the world was young?

Amane watched as Persephone gave a very pretty guy with long, floppy sleeves and a red ponytail a pile of photographs tied together with long, sharp blades of grass. They were pictures of somebody living, with intense eyes and a strange red earring, waving at the camera and holding up a sign that read, _“We miss you, Mitsuba, you jerk.”_

“From last spring,” Persephone told him. 

_Our Lady of Ways, our Lady of Means._

Amane watched as Persephone brought a pile of books over to a cold, grey man with a tattoo of a spider on the most sensitive part of his wrist. They were new releases, she said, but he’d have to read them here ‘cause her husband couldn’t be allowed to see. She showed the spider-man which book had been her favorite, last spring, when she could walk out under the stars. Something in the man’s face softened, then, listening. Remembering who he was and how he loved to _know_ things. Remembering a curiosity it was easy to stamp out, gathering riches eternally to pile at the foot of Lord Hades’s throne. Knowing there was no way to leave, and the River Lethe... the river of forgetting… was moving silently all around, full of its nameless ghosts.

_Our Lady of the Upside-Down._

Amane noticed a drawing of a donut, next to the cutesy bubble-letter menu title reading “Desserts,” and the next time Lady Persephone came by to check what he’d like to order he asked if he could have something like that. She told him of course he could – she’d whip one up for him in a second, just let her gather a few handfuls of godly power from the world above. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, defying Lord Hades just a little, little bit. It wasn’t as bad as if Amane’d asked to see the moon again, closer than mortals usually got to go. It wasn’t as bad as if he’d asked to visit distant stars, the way he’d always dreamed of doing when he was alive. Persephone could bring him those things, sure… and she’d _want_ to, he sort of knew she would… but… no. Amane wouldn’t ask for something like that, would he? Even if he came to Springtime again and again.

When Persephone brought Amane a plain, homemade donut on a wooden plate – a plate carved with grapes, with vines, with words in an ancient tongue Amane definitely couldn’t speak – he was a little taken aback when she sat down next to him. To eat _with_ him, maybe. Persephone asked about what Amane’s life had been like, before he boarded the train down to Hadestown, and he told her only a little bit. Only the good stuff. It wouldn’t have been right to refuse a goddess any answers at all, when he had donut crumbs from something she’d made for him on his dirty fingers. Amane had loved astronomy, before he died, and soccer, and monster movies. Amane had never joined one of the springtime revels, when Lady Persephone came to the earth, but he’d been to festivals in her honor. 

He asked what _she’d_ been like, too, in a quiet, mumbling voice… knowing it was something he probably shouldn’t meddle with, but also knowing she’d poured him a cup of iced tea and had _still not stood up_ to go resume her laughing business behind the bar… and Persephone said she’d been a lot more nervous, before. Said she’d judged herself kind of harshly, and hadn’t realized what sort of guy would actually make a good friend. She had liked playing games, though. And she’d been part of a Gardening Club.

But of course that last bit had to be true: didn’t Hades always find Persephone with dirt on her hands? Didn’t Hades always find Persephone in a garden? Again and again and again.

Persephone asked Amane if he’d like to play cards with her after she finished up this shift at Springtime, and he said sure. He had to get to work, now, too, but he’d be back as soon as he could drag himself free again. That was when Persephone asked if he’d like to be her assistant, instead – taking on duties around the bar, scrubbing dishes as opposed to crawling around in the mines. And Amane said… well. Amane said he was sure she could find somebody worthier of serving the Goddess of Springtime than a ghost like him. He didn’t say, _“Than a murderer like me,”_ but he thought it. He thought it, and a sorry sort of knowing passed over Persephone’s face.

“Hm,” the goddess said. Maybe she was wondering if she was misjudging her friends again, here; maybe she was thinking back to that moment when she’d first decided to take Hades’s bone-cold fingers and let him lead her down beneath the earth. But her eyes were too soft for that, weren’t they? Persephone was looking at Amane like she’d known him in another life. Like she already trusted him, and wanted to close up that seeping wound in his chest with a brush from her newly Olympus-born hand. “I think actually I want _you_ to work here, if you don’t mind it. I might’ve been too shy to say it like that, before everything. But what can hurt me now?”

“If you’re sure it’s okay,” Amane said. He drank his iced tea, and washed his hands for a long time in the sink, and warned Persephone that he’d try not to be any trouble but he couldn’t deny it was a possibility. She didn’t seem to mind too bad. 

***

“Tell Me, What’s My Name?”

***

Amane Yugi had been working as the goddess Persephone’s assistant for a long, long while before either of them heard the latest rumor about Orpheus. Now, _he_ was somebody Amane‘d been a little jealous of, when Persephone told stories about him before, to be honest — Orpheus was the son of a Muse, sure, and when he played his lyre the trees dragged their roots out of the earth to follow behind him. But more than that, Orpheus was one of Persephone’s own close friends, from her time up in the living world during the spring. While Amane was still down below, writing a pile of letters to her he may or may not actually give over when winter came again, Persephone was attending Orpheus’s concerts and filling the human gardens above with dripping fruit, with summer vegetables, with flowers. 

Orpheus knew Persephone in a way Amane had never gotten to, when he’d been a living soul himself. It was too late, now, wasn’t it? They would never be able to go _just anywhere_ together, hand-in-hand and careless. Amane had been a little comforted when he learned Orpheus had a long-time sweetheart — a girl called Eurydice. But then he’d scolded himself like, _“Hey, what makes you think the actual goddess of Springtime has any reason to stay loyal to a common murderer ghost like you, anyway? If anything, she’s forced to be loyal to Lord Hades, as awful as it is. He’s the one whose ring she wears.”_

But the ring Hades chose for Persephone didn’t fit her — it had been made for someone else, and Hades wouldn’t allow it to be altered even a little, little bit. It hurt her hand. And it wasn’t Hades who Persephone came hurrying to find, when she was carried down to the underworld again, anyway. She tucked red flowers behind Amane’s ear, and kissed his cheek, and threw her arms around his neck when he was sitting behind the bar and polishing glasses. She told him she’d missed him, even up in the world, even in her own spring. 

Amane hadn’t known what to say, realizing he was someone the goddess Persephone could truly miss. But he believed her — why would she lie? Smuggling actual living-world donuts down for him from his old favorite bakery wasn’t a lie; cleaning the bar with him wasn’t a lie, either, day after day, even if he did kinda wonder why she couldn’t just use magic. Maybe Persephone wanted to stay and talk to him longer. Like friends. _They were friends._ They were friends, and when Persephone said she wished she could take Amane with her when she left for the living world every year he laughed as if she were joking. 

But she wasn’t joking, was she? 

Amane had been there when Persephone filled the bar with stars, again and again, and he knew she still couldn’t understand why he always closed his eyes. Folded his arms around himself, until the wonder faded. When the Furies went on a rampage because that snarky red-ponytailed ghost Mitsuba ticked them off somehow, Persephone stood right between Amane and their rage. He’d come away a little different, after that. He took more care not to dig his nails into hands an actual goddess wanted to protect, you know. He found himself smiling more honestly, and taking off some of his heavier jackets even if blood might seep through embarrassingly from that hole in his chest. 

Persephone had seen Amane’s wound before, after all. She’d asked him if it still hurt, and when Amane said he was used to it, well, she’d mixed up a little concoction for his pain anyway. After all those years among the dead, Amane hadn’t realized how much something like that could help. How much _ache_ there still was to chase away with a weird shot-glass potion, followed quickly by a big bite of something a lot less gross tasting. 

It took a long time, but when Amane finally started telling Persephone about his crimes up on earth — _about Tsukasa_ — she let him talk, and then... when he didn’t seem to know how to continue... she squeezed his hand and told him she already knew. She’d known the whole time, actually; she _was_ the Queen of the Dead, in the end, whatever else she was too. She had seen Amane’s whole death the moment he first called out to her, asking if she needed a little help getting Hades’s pins out of her hair. 

That left Amane with so many more questions, honestly, but Persephone promised she would answer them one by one, until he was satisfied. She was a generous goddess like that, even if he did think it was a little strange she could forgive him at all. Forgive him, and still want him around, and choose to claim him, alone, out of the halls and halls full of so many restless dead. 

There were times when Persephone’s fights with Hades shook the underworld. There were times when she came to her own secret bar with heavy jeweled shackles around her wrists, and weighing down her ankles so she could barely drag her feet. But Amane was getting better and better at prying that kind of nonsense _off_ the goddess, if he did say so himself. He mixed drinks for her, and beat her at games they played, sometimes, and on the day they learned the newest gossip about Orpheus, son of Calliope, Amane _also_ learned the goddess Persephone’s mortal name. 

“You know, Eurydice died,” Persephone said, carefully, as she and Amane were in the middle of brainstorming new things to put on Springtime’s menus. “She was bitten by a snake, on her and Orpheus’s wedding night. Gone, just like that.”

“That’s rough,” Amane said. He meant it. The idea of _other people dying_ was starting to mean more to him again, hanging around Persephone so much. He was beginning to feel more like he had when he was alive, if he let himself admit it. “Does that mean she’s gonna be visiting us in Springtime, soon?”

“Oh, probably,” said Persephone. “But I’ve _also_ heard Orpheus is coming down here to bring her home.” 

“ _What_?” That was something you never heard, around the underworld. Once you got to Hadestown, you didn’t go back. Well, unless you were Persephone. Or the traveler god, Hermes. But otherwise: no way in hell. 

Persephone’s eyes danced the way she sometimes did around the bar, then, spinning on wood that was suddenly soft grass and moss, throwing her arms up to stern cave walls that were suddenly swaying trees, full of sunshine. “Orpheus is gonna sing a song for Hades, and I think he might really let them go. If anyone can get through to him, it’s Orpheus, isn’t it? If anyone can remind him what love is... and why he should go looking for his _real_ wife...”

For a second, Amane was too busy trying not to be jealous of Orpheus — trying not to let frustration slip onto his face, thinking of the freedom Orpheus could bring to the underworld that he had _no idea_ how to achieve, himself — to notice that Persephone had leaned in closer to him. To notice that she was talking about how she had _considered_ just running away with him, before, sorta like other Persephones had done over the years... but that doing so would’ve left all the other dead people in the lurch, around here! Escaping would just let this whole cycle keep on going, with no balance for Hades, no balance for the dead. 

What they needed was to spur Hades on to bring the true Persephone home. And then, maybe Amane would still want to spend time with her, with _his_ Persephone, even if she wasn’t a goddess anymore. And then, maybe they could be something like free. 

Amane did hear it, in the end. He heard it, and all he could say was, “Of course. I mean — of course I’d still want...” before Persephone whispered something sacred... something unknowable... in his ear. 

“When the time comes, you can call me Nene Yashiro, okay? That was my name, before I’d ever thought I could be Persephone. The Lord of the Underworld isn’t in love with me — but I think _you_ might be. Are you?”

Amane nodded. Choked on his words; words somebody dead like him wasn’t supposed to own, right? Springtime was only a stolen thing for the dead. Second chances and rebirth, freedom and growth and change. All that. It wasn’t _meant_ for him.

But Nene Yashiro was filling in as the goddess of Springtime, and she was doing her best to hand Amane back all of those things, like a slightly-squished donut box snuck past the Lord of the Underworld. She was trying to give him the moon, waiting behind a pay-per-view curtain, and when he told her that, yeah, he loved her, he was sorry, but he loved her, she looked him in the eyes and asked him to promise. As if her bad luck with men _might_ rear its head again, if he didn’t pinkie swear. If she didn’t get him laughing, baffled and self-conscious but relaxing into her arms before she’d finished her confession. 

No, the Lord of the Dead wasn’t in love with Nene Yashiro, but he _was_ in love with the wild, capricious goddess who had poured overflowing drinks in this bar long ago, before Nene was even born. It was hard to know, just then, if Orpheus’s song for the old man on the throne would be enough. If Nene’s friend Orpheus could ever really lead his wife up out of the dark, keeping his eyes straight ahead and not wavering in his resolve. Not looking back, so maybe... this time... Eurydice might not trickle away into pale sweet mist. Again and again and again. Like the dead always did, trying to climb back into the sun, just like Hades always found Persephone in a garden. 

It was hard to know if that first, heartbroken goddess of Springtime could ever be found again, too... if maybe Hades might catch a half-seen glimpse of her, just as Orpheus finished his song, and rise shaking to his feet. Reaching for his true wife again, after all this time. It was hard to know. It was impossible. 

But Amane asked Nene Yashiro if he could call her by her real name, that day, just quietly, and she said yes. She was counting on it. And whispering _love_ like that — even not knowing if the love song they were in could ever have a happy ending — was maybe all anyone could do. 

They could try. 

**Author's Note:**

> As a possibly-fun fact... that description where Hades “reclaims” Persephone, remaking her and forcibly pinning up her hair? I’ve been imagining variations of that for years, listening to this album — I usually imagine it during the song “Way Down Hadestown,” where Persephone goes “You’re early!” and Hades goes “I missed ya.” 
> 
> Section titles here come from the songs "Way Down Hadestown" and "Our Lady of the Underground." I also quote "Our Lady of the Underground" throughout the fic. 
> 
> Thank you, again!!!


End file.
